Even without knowing Yune’s past, I’m hard-pressed to imagine that Claude wouldn’t miss her if she returned to Japan. You’d have to be a robot not to feel something if an adorable and extremely helpful girl like her left all of a sudden.

If the goal of this episode was to make Oscar out as a fun-loving grandfather with all the cool toys, it worked wonderfully in that regard. Enseignes du Roy sure has a different atmosphere to it when Claude isn’t around.

The flashbacks continue to reshape my image of Camille ever so slightly but this latest one has me fairly convinced that she saw Claude as much more than a plaything. The look on her face when she peered into Enseignes du Roy was clearly of a girl who had feelings for the person she set her eyes on.

Wow, if this bonus episode was any indication of what the producers were saving for the BD/DVD releases, I sure hope they have another one in store. This particular episode is slated to be released on November 25th with the third volume, but was streamed online for a limited time, saving me from a long four and half month wait.

For all those shipping Claude and Yune already, sorry to burst your bubble, but the story is taking a different direction in terms of pairings. I had a hunch about it based on the character descriptions I read for the Summer 2011 Preview, but it wasn’t quite to the degree that they hinted at here.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could get upset with Yune when she tries so hard to be helpful, and while Claude didn’t really get mad at her, he did inadvertently make her feel like her Japanese sense of hospitality is a bad thing. She was like an innocent girl thrown into a labyrinth full of Parisian “wolves” and told to suspect everyone before trusting them.

To most viewers, this will undoubtedly be the slowest and most uneventful new series of the season, and be quickly written off as “boring” or “dull”, but for Aria fans such as myself, it’s one of my most anticipated adaptations of the season, featuring a heartwarming 19th century story about a young Japanese girl named Yune (Tooyama Nao, Kanon in Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai), who travels to Paris, France to work.